Papua is Indonesia’s largest and most eastern province. It is a land of exceptional natural splendor, with beautiful scenic beaches, immense stretches of marshlands, valleys, grassy meadows and powerful rivers cutting gorges and dark, dense primeval forests. Snow caps cover 5,000 meter-high mountain peaks that tower over glacier lakes.

The people of the island can be divided into more than 250 sub-groups, and include among others, the Marind-anim, Yah-ray, Asmat, Mandobo, Dani and Afyat. Most of the tribes have lived for centuries in isolation of each other and only just opened to the rest of the world in the 1930s.

Papua’s beautiful sea offers a rich variety of dives, a multitude of fish and marine species and amazing scenery both above and under water. In Sorong’s Wai Island base camp, reeds hold a myriad of colorful marine life, big and small, from sharks, rays, whales, dolphins, turtles and giant clams to schools of snapper, parrot fish, surgeon fish abd the list goes on.

But the jewel of Papual diving is the Raja Ampat diving sites which has a variety of diving sites, shallow bays, lagoon channels bordered by rainforest, rock islands and offshore reeds that contain the richest species of marine animals and corals in the world.

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